EITH -- A unifying representation for database schema and application code in enterprise knowledge extraction Mark S. Schmalz, Joachim Hammer, MingXi Wu, and Oguzhan Topsakal   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Innovative Approaches to Conceptual Modeling Abstract The integration of heterogeneous legacy databases requires understanding of database structure and content. We previously developed a theoretical and software infrastructure to support the extraction of schema and business rule information from legacy sources, combining database reverse engineering with semantic analysis of associated application code (DRE/SA). In this paper, we present a compact formalism called EITH that unifies the representation of database schema and application code. EITH can be efficiently derived from various types of schema representations, particularly the relational model, and supports comparison of a wide variety of schema and code constructs to enable interoperation. Unlike UML or E/R diagrams, for example, EITH has compact notation, is unambiguous, and uses a small set of efficient heuristics. We show how EITH is employed in the context of SEEK, using a construction project management example. We also show how EITH can represent various structures in relational databases, and can serve as an efficient representation for E/R diagrams. This suggests that EITH can support efficient matching of more complex, hierarchical structures via indexed tree representations, without compromising the EITH design philosophy or formalism. ©2005 Association for Computing Machinery